USB 3.0

Along the bottom is a spot for the S Pen, a speaker, micro-USB port, and Microphone. The speaker is almost uncomfortably loud at max volume, which is a very good thing. It's not going to top something like the HTC One with its dual front-facing speakers, but it's a solid performer.

The Note 3 is the first smartphone to support USB 3.0, which means that if you've got the right equipment, you'll get blazing fast file transfer speeds. In most devices, the bottleneck during computer-to-phone communication is the USB 2.0 connection. But with USB 3.0, the Note can receive files as quickly as the internal storage can handle. I was able to transfer a 9GB movie to the Note 3 over USB 3.0 in two minutes; moving the same file to the Note over USB 2.0 took four minutes.

Theoretically, another benefit of USB 3 should be faster charging from a computer, but the phone only says, "USB Charging" (as opposed to the faster "AC charging") when hooked up. The max draw from a USB 3.0 port is still only 1.5 amps, while the included charger is rated at 2 amps. For the fastest charge, you'll still need a wall outlet. Micro-USB 3.0 works by adding additional pins to the side of a micro-USB 2 port, meaning the connection itself is just longer. The good news is that everything is backward compatible—a micro-USB 2.0 cable will still fit in the port, it just doesn't use every pin. Samsung has included a fancy new micro-USB 3.0 cable (pictured to the right) with the Note 3, but it's nice to know that if you don't have it, your old stuff will still work.

USB 3.0 is still going through some growing pains. As you can see above, the Note 3 won't let you keep USB 3.0 on all the time. You have to enable it just before your transfer, and it will automatically disable itself after four minutes of inactivity. Every time you plug in the Note 3, you have to go to the settings and turn on USB 3.0 or you will transfer at 2.0 speeds. The above dialog box also gives the alarming warning that your radios may stop working due to interference with USB 3.0. Congrats to Samsung for being the first out of the door with this feature, but it looks like there are still some bugs to work out.

TouchWiz

TouchWiz is still here, and not much has changed. It looks pretty much like it did back when Samsung originally skinned Gingerbread. You'll be seeing a lot of dark blue, light blue, green, and black. Much of the way apps work is stuck in that era, too. Samsung's UI frequently relies on tabs, but it goes against the usual Android guidelines by not letting you horizontally swipe between tabs. This gets very annoying very quickly. The Note 3 still uses a menu button, which was deprecated almost two years ago. The menu button itself wouldn't be a big deal—the screen is huge, after all—but this has the same problem as the LG G2. A hardware menu button removes the overflow button from every action bar. There is no longer an on-screen indication that any additional options are present, which is a discoverability nightmare. Once you do remember to hit the Menu button, you'll usually be presented with a mile-long list of hidden options. TouchWiz heavily relies on hidden menus to do things, so much so that it's not unusual for the menu to have a scroll bar.

"Air Command" is the feature du jour for this version of TouchWiz. Just take the pen out or hover above the screen and tap the S-Pen button, and a radial menu will appear with several S-Pen-centric options. The first is "action memo," a pop-up notepad that will attempt to make sense of your scribbles with handwriting recognition. The "action" part of "Action memo" comes from the ability to pass what you've written to other apps. You can call a written phone number or move the text to the e-mail app, texting app, Web browser, maps, or task list. Writing down and calling phone numbers works, but everything else is really finicky. So much has to go right for it to be useful; it has to properly recognize your handwriting and detect which field in the app your text should go into. For e-mails, for instance, it will usually paste the entirety of what I've written into the "To:" field.

The other shortcuts in Air Command were in the Note II in some form or another. "Scrap Booker" will save a screenshot of whatever you circle on the screen, and it will try to include metadata like the URL of the website if you're using the browser. "Screen Write" will take a picture of the screen and let you write on it. "S-Finder" is Samsung's universal search, and it will even perform handwriting recognition on all your notes, index them, and include them in search results.

Samsung is still very focused on multitasking. Split screen apps return from the Note II, and these work exactly the same way, but you can now save pairs of apps as a shortcut. A long press on the back button will bring up a floating tab on the side of the screen, and tapping it will open the split screen app drawer. Drag one app to the top of the screen and another to the bottom, and you've now got two apps open! You can see all this happening in the extremely busyscreenshot on the left. Google apps are supported, and so are many third-party apps. You can even adjust the app sizes from 50/50 by dragging the center divider up and down.

Performance for the split screen apps is fantastic. You can rapidly switch between apps without a delay, and you can do things like play a movie in one half of the screen while working in the other without any slowdown. This is a big improvement over Samsung's first version of split screen, which would have a large delay when you moved between the top and bottom apps.

The center picture above shows apps in a floating window, which you access with the last shortcut in Air Control called "Pen Window." After picking Pen Window, draw a square on the screen representing the size of the window the app will be in and choose an app. This is the same software that's on the new Note 10, and when you have a screen that big, choosing the size of the window kind of makes sense. However, on a screen this small, there's really only one size of floating window you can make. Having to draw a box seems pointless, since all your windows end up being basically the same size.

Removing the "draw a box" step would have been a good idea, because right now it slows you down and just feels like a gimmick. Unlike split screen apps, support for this feature is very limited. On my device, the only options were Calculator, Clock, YouTube, Phone, Contacts, Hangouts, and Internet. The silliest thing about the floating windows is that the shape you draw has to be a perfect 16:9 aspect ratio or your app will be stretched out and distorted. In the right picture, you can see that Hangouts is stretched so much horizontally that the text is difficult to read. You can resize the windows after the fact, but that just means you spend more time fiddling with the interface than actually doing what you need to do. YouTube is particularly bad. In portrait mode, the floating app window will only display in portrait, so even if you hit full screen on the floating window, you have a portrait 9:16 window with a landscape 16:9 movie inside of it. There's no way to display YouTube without the massive black bars, and remember, in portrait mode, apps need to keep a portrait 9:16 shape or they will be distorted. Floating apps can be minimized and will shrink down to floating "chat head" bubbles when you press the minimize button or the home button, which you can see in the top right picture. These will float on top of any other window until you close them.

Enlarge/ Direct Pen Input: Just tap this icon and you can write in any text field.

Samsung has added pen input to the Android text box UI, so in any app, you can just hover over a text box with the S-Pen, and a little pen input icon will pop up. Tap it, and a handwriting recognition box will appear on top of the text box. Scribble away, and the Note 3 will convert your handwriting into text and place it into the text box. There's also a handwriting mode for the keyboard if you want to be really hardcore.

One of the most shocking blunders in the software department is the Gallery, which is literally unusable with the default settings. In the smartphone world, an app taking one second to launch is considered slow, but the Gallery on the Note 3 takes anywhere from 15 seconds to two minutes-plus to open. Albums take another 10 to 30 seconds to open. While this loading is happening, scrolling and touchscreen input often just don't work. The video below shows how crazy this is.The issue is that the Gallery on the Note 3 wants to display all the pictures on your phone, plus everything from Google+, plus everything from Dropbox. It just can't handle that many pictures. The device has been synced for several days, and it takes forever even with Airplane mode on, so it's not a data issue. While all this loading is happening, System Monitor shows a light CPU workload, almost no disk I/O, no network activity, and no change in RAM usage. We're really not sure what is taking so long. If you go to the settings, turn off Dropbox pictures and clear data, the Gallery goes from "completely unusable" to just "slow," but at least it will work without a multi-minute delay. I'm only using about 5GB of Dropbox storage, and the Note 3 comes with a 50GB Dropbox storage boost, so it's not like I have a crazy amount of data in my account. Having a quad-core 2.3GHz beast of a phone turn in this kind of performance is kind of sad.

Ron Amadeo / Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work.